• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I sat at my kitchen table sipping coffee and staring off into space. The coffee was sloshing against the sides of my cup, like it was trying to escape. That shouldn’t be happening.

Micah was suddenly at my side. He put his hand on my coffee mug. “You’re going to drop it.”

I stared up at him and didn’t know what he meant. It must have shown on my face, because he explained, “Your hands are shaking. I’m afraid you’re going to drop the cup.” He eased it out of my hands and set it on the table.

I stared at my hands, and he was right. They were shaking. Not a fine tremble, but a full-blown quaking, as if from the wrist down I was having a fit. I stared at my hands like they belonged to someone else.

Micah knelt in front of me, he put his hands on mine, held them tight between his. “Anita, what happened?”

It felt good for him to hold my hands. It helped the shaking to slow, but it didn’t go away. What happened? What had happened? What made this one different? Everything, nothing. It took me two tries to talk. “I had to talk to him.”

“Him who?”

“The vampire I killed tonight.” The trembling was quieting under the press of his hands. My voice didn’t show the trembling at all, it was empty.

“Why did you have to talk to him?”

“Interrogation, had to interrogate him.”

Micah touched my face, and it startled me, but it made me look at him. His eyes were very green in the dimness of the kitchen, with that yellow around his pupils more like light gathering around a single point. “Did you learn what you needed to know?”

I nodded, still staring at his eyes.

“And why couldn’t you wait until dawn to kill him?”

I shook my head. “He was one of our serial killers. Couldn’t risk him getting away and warning them.”

“Then you had to kill him.” He put his hand on the side of my face, and that made me look at him more, not just fascinate on his eyes. I saw him now, all of him, saw Micah. I’d known he was there, but it was as if I was only getting pieces of things. I looked at that face that was at once so familiar to me that I knew every curve and line, and yet, I was still surprised sometimes to look at him and realize that he was mine. That this was my sweetie. It still caught me off-guard sometimes, like a really good surprise. As if he was too good to be real, and I kept expecting him not to be there. Why should he be different?

He reached up to me, and I slid off the chair and into his arms. I wrapped myself around his waist, his chest, his shoulders. I hugged him as tight and close as I could with legs and arms, and he got to his feet with me still wrapped around him. We were the same height and weighed within fourteen pounds of each other. If he’d been human, he might not have been able to do it, but he wasn’t human, and he stood up and began to walk through the darkened house. I knew where we were going, and I couldn’t think of anything better than crawling under the covers and letting him hold me.

The phone rang. Micah kept walking. The machine caught it, and Ronnie’s voice came on. “ ’Nita this is Ronnie. I need help.” Micah froze, because it didn’t sound like Ronnie.

I hopped down to the floor and was running for the phone while she was still slurring her words. “Ronnie, Ronnie, it’s me. What’s happened?”

“Anita, it’s you.”

“Ronnie, what’s happened?” My pulse was thudding in my throat again. Adrenaline had chased the shock and the numbness away.

“I’m drunk,” she said happily.

“What?”

“I’m at a club across the river. I am watching men take their clothes off.”

“What club?”

“Something Dreams.”

“Incubus Dreams,” I said.

“That’s it,” and she slurred her S.

“Why are you at a strip club getting drunk?” I asked. The adrenaline was easing away.

“Louie won’t live with me. He says marriage or nothin’, and I said nuthin’.”

“Oh, Ronnie.”

“I am drunk, and the bartender says I need a ride. Can I have a ride?”

Micah was standing close enough that he’d caught some of it. “I’ll go get her.”

“Anita, why are men such bastards?”

I wasn’t sure that men were